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Medicine Transportation United States Technology

UPS Is Using Drones To Transport Medical Supplies Between Hospitals (cnbc.com) 30

Posted by BeauHD from the improving-efficiency dept.
UPS has partnered with autonomous drone company Matternet and hospital WakeMed in Raleigh, North Carolina, to test a new drone delivery service for transporting medical samples to nearby facilities. The FAA is overseeing the program. CNBC reports: UPS said the service will utilize Matternet's M2 "quadcopter" drone, which can carry medical samples of up to 5 pounds as far as 12.5 miles. The program will begin with "numerous planned daily revenue flights at the WakeMed Raleigh campus," UPS said. The drone delivery service aims to replace WakeMed's reliance on a fleet of courier cars, which currently transports most of the hospital's medical samples. Using a UPS "secure drone container," WakeMed employees can load medical specimens like blood samples and send them quickly to a nearby WakeMed facility.

Matternet has completed "more than 3,000 flights for healthcare systems in Switzerland," UPS added. The WakeMed program is also under the FAA's broader effort called the "Unmanned Aircraft System Integration Pilot Program," which "aims to test practical applications of drones by partnering local governments with private sector companies."
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UPS Is Using Drones To Transport Medical Supplies Between Hospitals More

UPS Is Using Drones To Transport Medical Supplies Between Hospitals

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  • Not bad (Score:4, Informative)

    by Major_Disorder ( 5019363 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @05:54PM (#58338680)
    Finally a good use for drone delivery. Sending small, time sensitive, cargos between two fixed points. Finally a use case that actually makes sense.

  • I still want my battlefield drones (Score:3)

    by Ichijo ( 607641 ) on Tuesday March 26, 2019 @06:02PM (#58338706) Journal

    You get blown up by a claymore or something but in your backpack is a swarm of little surgeon drones that find all the pieces, sorts them by DNA in case your buddy got blown up too, glues you back together and restarts your heart, all before hypoxia begins to cause brain damage. Then a week or two later you're doing patrols again.

  • Look Out Below.......

  • To you, it's medical supplies.

    Just saying.

  • Seems like birds might pose a huge problem to this, particularly in US urban areas - I'm not sure if Switzerland, the test bed, has the same city pigeon problem we have in the US. All it will take is 1 person being hit with 20#'s of bird strike wrecked, sky fall, blood soaked, detritus, for this project to be eaten alive by attorneys and lawsuits.

    • I would imagine this thing will fly close to it's allowed ceiling for most of it's trip. So shouldn't be tons of pigeon clouds for it to run into like it could on ground. And quadcopters are loud and angry sounding, birds get the hell away from them for the most part. Probably biggest worry would be territorial hawks or something along the flight path, lol.

  • The title states "supplies", the article says "samples". If it is actually samples, I have a big issue with people flying "red bag" materials with drones.

  • The headline implies that these deliveries are being made in volume and consistently RIGHT NOW. The summary clarified that UPS has PARTNERED with another company and are PLANNING some TEST FLIGHTS.

    That is very, very non-commital.

    This type of journalism perpetuates tech myths with the massive population that knows enough to recognize shallow tech concepts but with almost no understanding of the actual state of the technology in question.

    This kind of journalism is what will convinces people to invest their re

  • Autonomous aerial delivery of packages to buildings in congested areas like Manhattan and San Francisco would significantly reduce the impact of those deliveries on local infrastructure, like roads and bridges. Individual delivery to your door is not the only economical use of this technology.

  • A couple of small thoughts occur. When drone deliveries of lightweight items become routine between multiple points in any metropolitan area, inevitably expanding beyond hospitals and other limited applications, illegal drug dealers will naturally hop on that bandwagon. Why wouldn't they? One more drone zipping along inside a virtual cloud of them won't stand out. Increasing sophistication in autopilot capabilities over wider and wider areas will allow illicit dealers to decrease the risk of their runners o

  • Curious how much wind/rain/snow/hail a drone could handle.
    In calm, warm weather a drone performs just fine. Any gusting of wind and a light weight drone goes tumbling.

  • before it starts raining needles.

    Not that I'm against this at all. I'm just a fan of Murphy's Law.

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